He appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, saying he faced inhumane treatment if sent to America. He claims that he might get a jail term of 70 years, and that he’ll be held in Guantanamo Bay type conditions. The court gave him a temporary stay, but today turned him down without stating any reasons.

The Russian’s are in control of Georgia’s naval base at Poti. And they are sending vessels to the area, including the missile cruiser Moskva and two smaller craft on “peacekeeping” duties at the port of Sukhumi on the coast of Abkhazia, the breakaway region that the Kremlin recognised as independent on Tuesday.

The US Coastguard ship Dallas was due to visit Poti but has been sent instead to the southern Georgian-controlled port of Batumi to deliver relief supplies. This has caused raised eyebrows in Russia – they consider it most unusual for a NATO ship to be delivering aid under the circumstances.

“Let’s hope we don’t see any direct confrontation,” said Dmitri Peskov, spokesman for the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. Putin who, you may remember, was the president who destroyed entire cities in Chechnya to defeat rebels there. It is hard to believe that he suddenly dislikes confrontation. The military victories of the past weeks are extremely popular in Russia. So the government may well decide they’re on a roll, and go for the big one – a head-to-head with NATO and the USA.

Last week, president Dmitri Medvedev said that Russia would be within its rights to attack Poland since America had sited missiles there. He actually talked of a nuclear strike on a NATO member state! And Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko is saying that if someone doesn’t stop Russia, any country could be the next target.

Any country. Even the USA. Russia respects only the powerful. And America doesn’t seem powerful at all right now, bleating about how invading Georgia was “wrong”. Wake up, USA! The rights and wrongs don’t matter now – Georgia’s being carved up, and talk won’t stop it. Only action will count now.

So what should America do? Stand by and let Russia conquer its neighbors? Or get into a war that might go all the way?

To help you get your head round the command “sudo”, there’s an excellent example of its usage below:

The cartoon is from the webcomic xkcd.com. For your homework assignment go check it out! The cartoon on the front page today (26 Aug) is funny too. If you don’t get it, google “2 girls 1 cup”… or is it “1 cup 2 girls”? Whatever, once you’ve seen it you’ll wish you hadn’t!

But he still has has a chance to escape extradition – when the House of Lords turned down his appeal they ruled that he could take it to the European Court of Human Rights. So that’s what he’s doing. And you can help him!

If you go to this link, you can join in Human Rights Defence’s petition to the European Court that the extradition order be overturned. It’ll take you a couple of minutes to register your support… and it could make all the difference! The Court takes notice of petitions. Help make this petition so huge that they can’t help but take notice!

Gary McKinnon needs you! Sign the petition today!

Unfortunately, the House of Lords gave McKinnon only til the 28 August before he is extradited. So we all need to make our voices heard now! We can’t let him be dragged off to face whatever justice the USA doles out for “enemy combatants”. We already know he could get 70 years in prison. We also know the USA approve “robust interrogation” techniques including waterboarding! If McKinnon were a US citizen wanted in the UK, no way would the American government extradite him under these circumstances. So why should they get to torture him?

When I first wrote this post, I recommended the use of cfs. But that was a few years ago, and now I recommend truecrypt. cfs is fiddly, and is hard to get used to if you don’t use the command line interface much and don’t know how to RTFM. Whereas truecrypt has a nice graphic user interface, encrypts “on the fly”, and has a ton of other features that make it my fave encryption application. You can read all about it, and download it, at www.truecrypt.org.

Ubuntu does not, by default, provide a way to create password-protected directories. A right-click on a folder does offer to encrypt, but that is done with gpg, which uses a gpg key. You’d need to email your public key to anyone you wanted to have access to the folder, which is a rather cumbersome procedure when all you want is a simple password protection!

Using the -c flag with gpg (gpg -c) uses symmetrical encryption – this means a protected file can be opened with a password. But gpg -c works only on files, not directories.

Truecrypt is an encryption package that does allow the user to create password-protected directories. Unfortunately, you can’t install truecrypt with apt-get or Synaptic – it is not in any of the repsitories. But you can get it in .deb form, from www.truecrypt.org.

There is an app in the repositories that enables the user to create password-protected folders. This app, cfs, is for creating encrypted partitions and filesystems. And as a directory is a filesystem, cfs is good for our purpose.

cfs is a command-line utility. Unfortunately, many newbies don’t like using the command-line interface. But there’s no need to fear the CLI. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to use cfs to create a password-protected directory.

First thing we need to do is install cfs. This can be done through Synaptic or with apt-get. And as are going to be using a terminal for this procedure, we may as well start right now. So, open a terminal Applications > Accesories > Terminal and type in the command

sudo apt-get install cfs

Type in your password when prompted. apt-get will ask if you want to install the other packages that cfs depends on – answer “y” to all this. When cfs has been successfully installed, apt-get will exit and you’ll be returned to the command prompt.

There will now be several new commands available to you. The ones we will need today are cmkdir, cattach and cdetach.

Now we need to create the encrypted directory. To do this, we will use the command cmkdir. cfs will ask for a “key” – this is the pass phrase you will use to open the folder in the future, and must be at least 16 character long. In this example I’m going to call my encrypted directory “lock”.

So, go to the location where you want to put the directory and create it,

user@ubuntu:~$ cmkdir lock
Key:
Again:
user@ubuntu:~$

So, the encrypted directory “lock” has been created in my home directory – ie ~/lock. Now we want to put our secret files into it. This is done by attaching another directory to ~/lock. I’ll call this one “clock”, but you can call it whatever you like. cfs will ask for the key – this means the pass phrase you just made up.

user@ubuntu:~$ cattach lock clock
Key:
user@ubuntu:~$

If you look in the directory /crypt you will find the directory you just made – /crypt/clock. This is where you want to put your secret files. You don’t put the files direcly into ~/lock.

user@ubuntu:~$ mv file1 file2 file3 /crypt/clock/
user@ubuntu:~$

Now, to close ~/lock so no one can get into it, we need to unattach the directory with the cdetach command.

user@ubuntu:~$ cdetach clock
user@ubuntu:~$

Do you want to check that your files are in ~/lock, and that they’re encrypted? Well, let’s see a list of ~/lock’s contents:

When you want to access your secret files, or if you want to put more files into ~/lock, you must first reattach it, using cattach. You move files in or out of the attached directory in /crypt – you never put files directory into ~/lock. Then when you’re finished, you retach using cdetach. You must never forget to detach if you want to keep the secret files secret.

The changes to the rules include increasing the length of time child-sex offenders can be banned from travelling abroad and making it easier for the police to obtain orders curbing activities in the UK.

Now, it’s all very well imposing these kind of draconian measures on pedophiles – no one has sympathy for a beast, most people think they deserve everything they get. But I worry this is just the start of something much more wide-ranging. First of all it’ll just be sex-cases who get these restrictions… but soon it’ll be all criminals… then all people who the government decide need restriction. Before you know it, you’ll be banned from leaving the country because you voted the wrong way at the last general election!

And don’t say “It can’t happen here!” It can. It has before. And it certainly will again!

There have been some right problems with Pulseaudio and Flash in Hardy. Youtube videos playing with no sound… Firefox freezing and crashing… it’s been a right pain in the ass.

But it seems these issues may have been resolved. Psyke83, an Ubuntuforums.org member, posted what appears to be a definitive fix here. This howto enables you to use Pulseaudio and Flash 10. Something I’d begun to fear might never happen…

Now, I only just enacted this fix on my machine, and I have yet to give it a proper testing on a variety of video streaming sites and music formats and so on. But it does look promising – right away I’ve noticed how less buggy Firefox seems…